Manufacturing methods for mass production of lighting fixtures are known in the art. Two common manufacturing methods used in the industry to produce the housings for light fixtures include the sheet metal (“roll formed” and/or “press fabricated”) technique and “extruded aluminum” technique. When it comes to mass production of large volumes of a predetermined number of standard sizes and shapes of light fixtures, either of these methods are suitable and the decision as to which one to use is based on a number of financial and logistical factors understood by those in the art. However, when it comes to manufacturing various volumes of light fixtures that will be produced for a given order with various differing ceiling interfaces and fixtures widths, both of these standard methods have their drawbacks.
To put the typical dilemma in context, when a large order of recessed lights is placed for an area having a lot of different lights and ceiling interfaces, such as an airport, the problem of how to meet the requirements of a large number of ceiling interfaces for varying fixture widths is presented. For example, if the project involves fifteen different ceiling interfaces, then for an installation involving four different fixture widths and a single fixture length, sixty different housings are required (15×4×1=60). However, typical installations can involve five different lengths or more raising the permutations of required housings to at least 300 (60×5=300). Moreover, if “rows” of fixtures are required for different areas (2's, 3's, 4's), the number of housings could be pushed to 900 or more.
As will be appreciated, faced with large volumes of varying fixture housings, the two common manufacturing methods present technological and cost-prohibitive problems. For example, with sheet metal housings, even with an unlimited tooling budget, a roll former could not satisfy the number of housing variations required. Likewise, with press fabricated housings the ability to meet all of the required variations would not only be problematic but also conceivably result in countless, and prohibitive, numbers of parts to meet the required housing configurations. These problems essentially foreclose the ability to rely on sheet metal production methods to complete these types of custom projects in a cost efficient manner.
Similarly, with extruded aluminum housing profiles, a number of practical and logistical problems are presented. First, extruded aluminum is relatively expensive. The expense is exasperated given the size of the extrusion profiles which would be required to satisfy the variety of housings called for by the project. Inventory also presents a problem because the production volume for even a relatively large project would not be high enough to “beat down” the cost of the aluminum extrusion with large extrusion runs as it would be in typical mass production settings. In other words, to be able to satisfy all the needs, “raw lengths” of about sixty different aluminum extrusion profiles would need to be ready to satisfy production orders. Even if practicable in a given situation, additional secondary operations such as holes, slots, etc. would require costly machining operations (as compared to sheet metal operations). These drawbacks essentially foreclose the ability to use extruded aluminum methods to complete typical custom projects in a cost efficient manner.
The foregoing underscores some of the problems with conventional fixture housing construction methods, especially in batch job situations. Furthermore, the foregoing highlights the long-felt, yet unresolved need in the art for a construction method that can be commercially practicable in small scale productions with varying fixture configuration requirements. In addition, the foregoing highlights the inventor's recognition and need in the art for a construction method that overcomes the disadvantages and challenges of sheet metal fixture manufacturing methods and extruded aluminum fixture manufacturing techniques.